TL;DR: On September 9, 2026, EFF senior staff attorneys Karen Gullo and Adam Schwartz published an essay collecting more than a decade of evidence that US law enforcement hides its use of automated license plate readers, cell-site simulators (Stingrays), and facial recognition from defendants, judges, and the public. The essay catalogs agency policies that instruct officers not to mention ALPRs in reports, court rulings that exposed stingray use only after defendants fought back, and a historical FBI practice EFF now calls "evidence laundering." EFF's closing prescription is the Atlas of Surveillance, a public database readers can search for their local police contracts.
What Hiding Surveillance Tech Looks Like
The EFF essay collects agency policies and incident reports in which police conceal ALPR, Stingray, and facial recognition use. In one unnamed Iowa county, the Flock ALPR usage policy reportedly tells officers to "DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE" and "DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY." Officers are told to write "county resources" in place of acknowledging the plate reader. In Houston, EFF reports, police were instructed to "be as vague as permissible" about Flock system use, in order to frustrate public records requests [1].
The concealment pattern runs in both directions: hiding the technology from the people it is used against, and hiding it from the court records that would let a defendant challenge it. EFF notes that Sheboygan, Wisconsin police covered up Flock Safety cameras and that some officers in the same department used ALPRs to spy on exes [1]. The latter is the version that ends up in disciplinary files; the former is the version that ends up on the public street corner with no sign and no notice. This site's reporting on states blocking public access to ALPR data covers the parallel move by legislatures, where seven states have made the same question effectively unaskable through public records law.
The Stingray Court Record: Baltimore, 2015
The cell-site simulator section of the EFF essay is built around State v. Andrews, a Baltimore case whose June 4, 2015 hearing transcript EFF links to in full. In that case, a Maryland judge ruled that Baltimore police had used pen register orders to intentionally hide their use of a Stingray device [1]. Pen register orders are the simpler tool courts use for call log data and historically do not require probable cause; EFF notes police "deceptively obtain" the orders and use them to get location data from a device that "tricks cell phones into connecting to it." The Baltimore ruling produced what EFF describes as a "landmark 2015 privacy ruling" requiring a warrant [1].
Even when a court orders disclosure, agencies have worked to keep Stingray details out of the case file. EFF cites prosecutors who accepted plea deals to hide cell-site simulator use and FBI cases that were dropped rather than disclose. The U.S. Marshals Service, EFF reports, drove files hundreds of miles to thwart public records requests, an episode from 2014 [1]. The pattern is the same: when the device's existence threatens a conviction, the device disappears from the docket.
The AT&T Hemisphere Precedent, Re-Labeled "Evidence Laundering"
EFF reaches further back to the mid-2000s and the AT&T Hemisphere program, a phone surveillance tool the carrier built for law enforcement. The program required agencies not to use Hemisphere-derived evidence in court unless there was no other admissible evidence. When Hemisphere information led to a lead, police had to recreate the evidence through a traditional subpoena. Law enforcement called the recreation process "parallel construction." EFF's essay relabels it "evidence laundering" [1].
The relabeling is the point. Hemisphere was first disclosed publicly in 2013 and EFF's own 2016 and 2018 reporting documented the program's scope. What the new essay adds is the framing: hiding surveillance from the courtroom is not a one-off Stingray or ALPR story. It is a recurring institutional posture, in which the technology that built the case is precisely the part the case is built to keep out. The same posture is visible in the EFF-collected examples above, and in current facial recognition use, where EFF notes that vendors, contracts, and search logs rarely surface in discovery [1].
Where Disclosure Has Reached the Public
EFF's essay notes that two states have "recently stepped back from ALPRs," with a link to separate reporting on Texas and Florida. This site's coverage of those two pullbacks documents Governor Abbott halting Texas state funding for Flock grants on August 28 after a newspaper traced $30 million back to a $1 auto insurance fee, and Governor DeSantis ordering every ALPR off Florida state highway right-of-way within 30 days [2]. EFF separately cites cities that have cancelled ALPR networks or covered up cameras, in line with the broader cancellation wave of city Flock contracts tracked on this site [1][3].
Pullback at the funding or permit layer does not reach the courtroom. EFF's argument is that without disclosure at the case level, defendants cannot challenge surveillance evidence and judges cannot rule on its constitutionality. The concealment the essay documents is procedural: it lives in policies, plea structures, and records offices, not in statute.
What to Watch
State v. Andrews as precedent. The Baltimore warrant requirement is now a decade old. Watch whether any of the still-pending facial recognition and ALPR cases cite it directly, and whether defendants in states that have not adopted Carpenter-era warrant rules can use it to compel disclosure [1].
Atlas of Surveillance coverage. EFF points readers to atlasofsurveillance.org as the first stop for anyone wondering what their local police have contracted for. Watch the database's expansion: new contracts, vendor disclosures, and the gap between what is filed publicly and what an officer is told not to mention in a report [1].
Texas and Florida carry-through. The two governors' pullback orders at the end of August did not reach city streets and parking lots. Watch whether either governor follows up with a records-disclosure order that would expose what those cameras captured before removal [2].
Sources
- Electronic Frontier Foundation, Karen Gullo and Adam Schwartz: “Cops Play Hide and Seek About Using Spy Tech to Avoid Scrutiny and Bad PR” (September 9, 2026)
- State of Surveillance: Texas Halted Flock Funding. Florida Ordered Cameras Off Highways. (September 7, 2026)
- State of Surveillance: Flock Safety Cancel Wave 30 Cities ALPR Surveillance Contracts (2026)